GIRDLEMOMMA: Last stop the girdlegirl store. We will sob
& cut ourselves in pencil skirts.

The GirdleClerks activ8 behind the counter:
double-chins shake until they smile invitingly.

GIRDLEBABY: I cry lard pellets—suck on crumbs for comfort.

GIRDLEBABY shoves her encased sausage
thigh into shorts she’ll never wear, causing Thickpussy
Imprint Protrusion. She stares at herself for a long time
as lardstreams flood her clothing; she is chunkier
now than before.

Outside of the dressing room GIRDLEMOMMA grunts.
She tightens her epidermis w/a spandex binder & moans
sweetly into her own ear.

GIRDLEMOMMA: Constriction sweeter than sugar-blood.

Thin humanoids loiter at the storefront, look in with big eye
small hips, point at GIRDLEBABY, asking if she’s real.

Humanoid #1: what is fat but has skin
Humanoid #2: yellow bulbous goo
Humanoid #1: I’m, like, not even real; twas written in wallblood

GIRDLEMOMMA , noticing the screams of her baby-girdle,
leaks instinctual teetjuice from her succulence.

CREEPERPEEPERS

GIRDLEBABY is under the spyderlace canopy, staring upward
w/grumble-guts. She sprawls across her bedding & knocks
4 of her lard poles together; they expand & bounce like Newton’s
ball-click cradle. Last night she dreamt of a vamp @ her window,
pledging male fang belly-suck. Her eyes roll back in2 the skull.

A happy crevice burrows across her cheeks; teeth are
barely visible: ground to gums.
GIRDLEBABY reaches into a craft bag
of writhing phalanges. She glues them to an old back-scratcher.

GIRDLEBABY: I will now prepare the entrance.

BABOOMBANG

There is a thump from the closet. Undeterred, however,
as her girdle begins to boil over,
GIRDLEBABY envisions the vamp.
She bids him nearer w/a pout.

GIRDLEBABY, giggling: Oh, my blood is all stopped up!

Slowly, GIRDLEBABY drags the fingerstick
across her risen teets. Its long yellow nails pinch
& scrape her jello mounds. She watches in awe @
digital magik. Her blushed nubs tremble.

Humanoid #1 & Humanoid #2 slam mutually into a room.
The ruckus erupts the tile floor in dust;
yellow clumps rerupture in all corners of the room.
Rust cracks on the equipment surrounding.
They waste no time.

Humanoid #2 is pumped w/vasoconstriction; the leftover serum
expired by prior yrs. Swaying in the glass wall reflection,
she wears an old gas mask coated in different spit.
Her gown is damp & she cannot see her eyes.

Humanoid #1: All work & no play make the humanoid a dull girl.
Humanoid #2: I’m all juiced up, sis; I can taste my skinny!
Humanoid #1: We dance w/the devil in the pale moonlight.

Before I was girdled, I didn’t know my #’s,
but focusing now,
I feel maybe 5 vaginal deposits within me.
Momma tells me I could have
girdle-babes of my own some day,
40 in each spydersac.
She tells me that my thick liquid distinguishes
fart from fertility
& I am full of both.
My fleshular masses are
stopped ^ w/ moo moo mucus
cervical goo; there is no room for
food or another 8-legged monster
inside these fat sacs.

I don’t need no scrubs nor the rubbing procreation.
I need for meatus tube-feed:
different juice, the kind that creates
substantial volume in humanchunks.
Momma doesn’t know I swallow whole.

Katy Cousino is an MFA candidate at the University of Notre Dame. She facilitates writing workshops weekly with the young women at the Juvenile Justice Center of South Bend. She believes that poetry is a powerful tool for social justice.

06 June 2015

Today I have sought
the birds in my chest.
Heavy trill,
hard fist
suspended from soul’s center.
Today I have defended myself
from the street and the tree,
from their wall of feathers and tongues.
Today I fear the crazed song
that rises from inside me.
Today I fear silence.
I want the flight of my birds
how I want you!
Until wing by wing,
shadow opened,
we kiss freely.

—from Heart of Outer Skin, 1959

LOOKING AT EACH OTHER WE COULD FORGET THE NUMBER

Maybe revolving over the city
the machines rebel.
The filing cabinets like flowers
open
quickly fanning out,
and corral man.
It may be that the wall of my house
suspends a bit its weight
and watches my sleeping body.
Hounded walking with the fugitives.
By the field and by the river,
at the hour that the sun takes the day laughing.
We could forget the number brothers.
Looking at each other.

—from Heart of Outer Skin, 1959

MY TONGUE

My tongue sinks
deep tremors in your body.
My tongue lives
skips of your idiom
in your throat.
My tongue flies
and cuts
beat of water
your belly.
My tongue ties
far away in your blood.
My tongue looks
and sees only one tongue.
And today winds of stone blow
and there are millions of mouths that seek
tongues to make hearts stand on end.
Tongues that inhabit the chest.
Tongues in vigil erect,
on the eyes on the brow.

—from Heart of Outer Skin, 1959

PILGRIMAGE TOWARD THE SUN

Night you joined fire in water on land transformed by the sky.

Where did your flame appear?
Cell and panel of glass captivate me.
Make in me a forest of total innocence where fury and love
graze, beneath the still clarity of silence.
Who opened the air and separated my tranquil beatitude?
A god in the sea inspires his storm.
A god on land flaps the windows and his angel goes wandering.

—published in La Nación on March 7, 1971

ECCE HOMO

If it is already time to raise his Dominion,
make it
your width, your length, your absolute depth.
Break my heaven, fled sea, home of
fiends.
Ease my sun in motion to the air of your
arrogance in the emptiness of your calm.
Tree of gods. Tempest of birds.
Tremor in temples of fear. An absent god
in the origin of god that
I pursue.
Same as children similar to the savages
of death find your justice
in zeal see the prayer of your first
angel your angel fallen in the
terror of dream.

—published in La Nación on January 16, 1972

MIGUEL ÁNGEL BUSTOS was a major poet of the Argentine Generation of 1960. His Visión de los hijos del mal, with a prologue by Leopoldo Marechal, won the Buenos Aires Municipal Prize for Poetry in 1968. Bustos became an early victim of the military dictatorship, which ushered in decades of censorship of his poetry. His collected poetry was republished in 2008, the first time it had appeared in print in more than thirty years. Bustos’s remains were identified in 2014 by forensic anthropologists.

LUCINA SCHELL is founding editor of readingintranslation.com, dedicated to publishing reviews of literature in translation written by translators. Her translations of Bustos appear in Ezra Translation Journal, the Bitter Oleander, and Drunken Boat and her literary reviews have been published in Ezra and Zoland Poetry.